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Saturday, 19 July 2014

Folk Tale Dev Blog 25

Welcome to Folk Tale Dev Blog 25. With Patch 0.2.7 recently released on Steam we've got lots of improvements to share with you today. In an experimental change to our regular format, the video is the most recent Dev Hangout live stream where I explore the patch in detail. It's much longer than usual clocking in at over 100 minutes, so feel free to skip bits.

Sandbox continues to progress in leaps and bounds, with city building and economy moving beyond that of the original Tutorial. The first change you'll notice is that resources are now important, and you won't be able to construct larger buildings until you've harvested enough resources.

The Woodcutter Hut now produces an additional product, Firewood. Firewood is required by buildings to keep the occupants warm. If you're producing too much or too little firewood, you can toggle production of Planks and Firewood in the Production Tab of the Buildings Dialog. Not producing Planks will double the output of Firewood, and vice versa. Allocating potential work output between production and research is also working, and you can now start accumulating research points which are shown on the top bar. We'll be adding research options to spend those points on in a future patch.

Villagers collect Firewood direct from the Woodcutter's Hut, or a Storehouse if you have one, and carry it to their home building. In a future update delivering Firewood to a building will cause chimney smoke to rise as the wood burns. Once the fire goes out, villagers will need to collect more Firewood. Being cold for too long will have an adverse affect on the happiness of a building's occupants. For now though, they may stockpile Firewood in their homes.

We've capped the number of trainable professions per building to a very low 2. We had meant to increase this to 5, but unfortunately it didn't make it into this build. For now, if you want more of a profession, simply build more of that building type.

Economy chains are now in, including the Farmer growing Wheat, milling it into Flour in the Windmill, before carrying it to the Storehouse. The Baker will collect the Sacks of Flour and bake them into Bread at the Bakery.

The Hunting Lodge now supports roaming Hunters who will kill Deer and carry them back to the Lodge for skinning, before carrying the carcasses to the nearest Storehouse. The Butcher will collect the carcasses and carry them to the Butchery where he'll chop them into Raw Meat.

The Monastery now farms the Bee Yard for Honeycomb and brews Barrels Of Mead which the Monks carry to the Storehouse. The Innkeeper collects the barrels and carries them to the Tavern for selling on to villagers.

In the next patch we'll add the final economy part which is where villagers have needs and will visit each of the vendors to purchase finished goods in exchange for gold. For now though we've given you plenty of starting gold, and if you run out hold down G,O,D on the keyboard to replenish your coffers.

While I'm on the subject of the Monastery, we've added Prayers to the top bar in preparation for the next patch. Villagers will have a need to worship the Holy Toast, and will visit the Monastery to pray, generating Prayers. These Prayer points, simply referred to as Prayers, will eventually be spent on Miracles which will appear under the Monastery Building Dialog in place of the crafting tab.

As your village expands, you'll be needing a steady supply of Peasants to train in new professions. Population expansion has been added, and building five or more cottages will now lead to new peasants appearing in your village. In testing I've had over 200 villagers and lots of buildings, but currently the frame rate will drop. We'll continue to optimize throughout development and the frame rate will start to recover. For now though, you can try reducing your settings, which will help if your PC is limited by the graphics card.

There are a number of other changes in the village, including Wells which are now constructible but not functional. In time these will supply water for economy production and putting out fires. The other changes I'll leave for you to discover.

Combat is fleshing out nicely, although the monsters are currently over-powered so you need to be tactical with your pulling, and go mob-handed by building lots of Barracks. Tower-mounted Trebuchet now target enemy units and do area damage, and we've updated the Repeating Crossbow asset and made it functional, reining down bolts at approaching enemies.

Professions are now attacking with the proper weapons and animations. Farmers fight with Pitch Forks, Butchers with Cleavers, Bakers with Rolling Pins, Innkeepers with Broken Bottles, and so on.

New Monsters have been added or made spawnable in the Editor, including Wolves, Giant Snails, Swamp Beasts, Skeleton Warriors and Necromancers. We'll be adding Earth Mothers, Forest Imps and the Goblins in subsequent patches.

We've also added a number of new terrain tiles, including 1/4 and 1/2 height waterfalls, and full height stone stairs cut into cliffs. You can check them out by opening the Human Village map in the Editor. Bridges have also received a navmesh fix that was preventing villagers from crossing in certain positions.

I'd also like to announce the Sunday Dev Hangout stream on Twitch.tv. Every Sunday I'll be streaming live, playing the latest dev builds, designing levels in the Editor, and answering community questions. You can find our channel at www.twitch.tv/gamesfoundry where there is a schedule for different time zones, and a number of earlier streams including a play through of Patch 0.2.7. Creating a Twitch account and following the channel will send you an email notification when we're about to go live. You can also follow us on Twitter (@gamesfoundry) account, where we announce streams just before we go live.

Thanks for watching - especially if you made it through the 100 minute video!